All Knowledge in a Circle. From the Republic of Letters to Cosmopolitanism

The article evaluates the encyclopaedic adventure of the second half of the XVIII century, and the circulation of knowledge that occurred throughout Europe, driven by the success – ideological and commercial – that the old Encyclopédie had obtained. Was it only a matter of the working hypothesis of interpreters, printers or publishers in search of economic and/or cultural success or did the interpreters, publishers and printers realise more acutely than the savants that it was time, or in any event, so it seemed, to relaunch the most advanced and effective forms of a patrimony of knowledge and orientations which, also due to their structure or to the difficulty in decoding interpretative criteria proposed thirty years prior, had lost effectiveness and topicality? Once again, the truth most likely lay somewhere in the middle or perhaps somewhere, as in the introduction to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, trends emerged anticipating a new order for knowledge and disciplines, necessary also for society. Or yet again, and this is especially true for France, perhaps the vacancy left in schools by the suppression of the Jesuit colleges and the growing attention for public education urged for instruments intended for an ordered and systematic diffusion of disciplinary knowledge. In many respects, the Britannica and the Méthodique served to re-establish the relationship between the encyclopaedia and the implementation of the educational curricula of schools and universities that the Encyclopédie had abruptly interrupted. Beyond any other type of consideration, however, we must admit that the polarities introduced by Diderot and d’Alembert as to the question of the expansion and growth of knowledge, its natural ordering and the matter of its promulgation were to become prolegomena to all later discussion of philosophy as encyclopaedia, or as conception and general and scientific representation of the world. All those who thereafter confronted the problem under the philosophical profile, for one reason or another rejected the alphabetical arrangement of data, as well as trees of knowledge with their implications. And yet, none of them would renege the need to consider the encyclopaedia as a theoretical place where strategies of unification and cooperation of the sciences coexist with lines of expansion, accumulation and communication of knowledge. At least until the end of the XX century, the dictionary as apparent chaos and the encyclopaedia as provisional order would continue to be inalienable categories of reference for all scientific representations of the world and would take on the shape of fundamental vehicles in the circulation of knowledge.